Re: Emacs learning curve

[joakim]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 8:39 PM, Tom <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> And why not add these by simply reusing the work of others?
>>
>> The most requested and popular features are code
>> completion, refactoring and such. I know CEDET can do some of
>> these, but I wonder if Emacs should harness the effort put into
>> these areas by other development teams.
>>
>> Take a look at the screenshots IdeBridge for example:
>>
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IdeBridge>
>>
>> It uses SharpDevelop libraries to provide completion. I know a
>> pure elisp solution would be the best, but given the plethora of
>> languages it's not a realistic goal to provide a comprehensive
>> Elisp backend solution for everything due to limited developer
>> resources.
>>
>> The best approach may be to provide a standard code
>> completion (refactoring, documentation lookup, etc.) frontend in
>> Emacs into which any backend implementation can be
>> plugged. People would write bridge code like in the above example
>> to handle communication between the frontend and the selected
>> backend. There are no licensing issues, because it can work
>> with process communication.
>
>
> I think that CEDET already makes this possible, but Eric can surely
> give a better answer. (Maybe this should be pointed out very clearly
> in Emacs doc, at least as a goal?)

Just to reiterate, (Eric will surely put it better):
- Cedet is as the name implies "a Collection of Emacs Development Tools"
- One tool is Semantic, which basically is a collection of interfaces
and different implementations of parsers for various languages
- It is possible to implement the semantic interfaces on various
different backends, several such implementations are included in Emacs.

I worked on a couple of such implementations, and while its not always
super obvious how to do it, I think anyone with a genuine interest in
implementing a new backend to Semantic can do it. In fact, not using the
Cedet interfaces is what would be a waste, its the best shot Emacs has
at implementing these modern ide facilities.

-- 
Joakim Verona